Category Archives: Food

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food, Good stuff

One tiny chicken, three+ dinners

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You know, if I were to write a parody of Real Simple and other magazines aimed at over-scheduled upper-middle-class suburban moms (and those of us who will no doubt be OSUMCSMs (catchy) in a few more years, heh) I would probably focus the food section on how rotisserie chickens are The Answer! To Everything!

And I’ve never bought one.

But last month I was down in CT visiting Greta and Jack, along w/ our friend Ann, while all the husbands went skiing for the weekend, and Greta turned out a series of awesome meals while also chasing after a toddler, and one night she pulled out a rotisserie chicken and we pretty much just ate it while standing around the kitchen counter and pulling pieces off with our hands, and I thought “Genius! Ready-to-eat meat, plus leftovers!” as if I hadn’t read that exact tip 9000 times.

So I had Ben pick up a rotisserie chicken, and when he got it home I looked at the weight and thought “good lord, a pound and a half? It’s minsky!” but then I got three meals out of it and still had leftover shredded meat, which I never did use because I’m a mess.

Anyway. Night one: Chicken w/ fried polenta cakes and cavalo nero slow-cooked with garlic. Oily and delicious, just the way I like it.

Night two: Shredded chicken quesadillas. (I shredded the chicken and heated it up in a bit of broth with taco spice from Christina’s spice shop in it, but I don’t think I used enough spice mix.)

BTW, I use greek yogurt instead of sour cream. My mom always used plain yogurt and you don’t really notice the difference, especially w/ greek yogurt, since it’s so thick.

Night three: Nachos! It was Friday.

Once again Trader Joe’s impressed me: I used their “longboard” corn chips, which were delicious, and the mild salsa that isn’t chunky, from the refrigerated section. That was *awesome*.

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I’m in a funk, guys. I miss NYC and I’m kind of lonely in Cambridge. I don’t leave the house enough, especially when the weather is bad. I feel like there are art projects or something exploding inside me, but I can’t seem to actually do anything. I am excited to work on updating my downstairs neighbor’s apartment: He has loads of great antiques and things, but needs a hand picking paint colors, rearranging the rooms, and paring down. I already found him a leather chesterfield sofa on craig’s list for a song, which was satisfying. And yesterday I amused myself drawing a floorplan and playing with furniture placement. But what am I to do with all the inspiration pictures I just put in Domino Deco File books last week? Sigh.

Cooking, Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food, Recipes

Bubble and Squeak

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I’m obsessed with Jamie Oliver‘s show Jamie at Home, and have saved nearly every episode on my DVR (messy!). This might sound ridiculous, but this is the only modern cooking show I’ve seen that captures a bit of Julia Child’s spirit: Jamie is having so much *fun* and is so relaxed and human on camera (not to mention so free with “tablespoons” of salt or butter that look more like quarter pounds!). Anyway, I usually just watch it for technique ideas of how to use my CSA vegetables, since the whole show is based around seasonal cooking using what’s in Jamie’s garden. I haven’t looked up many of the recipes, though I did give my mom the show cookbook for her birthday.

But considering that my fridge is fairly packed with rutabaga (or “Swede,” in the UK), turnips, carrots and cabbage, I couldn’t resist giving the Bubble and Squeak recipe from the “Winter Veg” episode a try. And it ACTUALLY SQUEAKS. I stood in the kitchen giggling, no joke.

[I didn’t make the onion gravy, and we just grilled some sausages. I want to try again and make the gravy; this was delicious but could have used an extra boost of moisture and flavor.]

Basically you peel and trim and cut up a one-to-one mix of potatoes and assorted winter vegetables; a bit more than a pound each. I used white potatoes, white and red turnips, rutabaga and a bit of cabbage:

Cover with water and boil until fully cooked. My vegetables cooked at really different rates, and I’ll play around with cutting the denser ones into smaller pieces next time. Jamie says 15-20 minutes to cook, but I think I needed about half an hour since some things wouldn’t soften!

Drain the vegetables and heat olive oil and butter in a large nonstick pan; add the vegetables and mash them together (add salt and pepper now) to make a giant pancake/hashbrown sort of thing:

Then all you do is cook it on medium heat for about 30 minutes. Every few minutes, when the bottom gets golden, you flip the pancake piece by piece and mush it together again. Eventually you get the delicious crispy bits all through the pan, not just on the top and bottom. And meanwhile, listen for the squeaking! I think it’s air escaping from within the smushed-together pancake.

This was a great side dish with sausage, but would also be good with pork chops (and apples, for some juice), or with a stew.

Cooking, Family, Farm Box, Food, Home, Recipes, The Apartment

Embarrassment of riches

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So here’s a problem I’ve never had before and doubt I’ll ever have again: We are the owners of too much steak. We received generous and delectable assortments of steak from two sources in the last six months, and our small freezer drawer was beginning to get a bit unruly. We gobbled down two of the NY strips at Thanksgiving with my parents, and by mid-December I thawed a couple filets for a randomly fancy weeknight meal.

I’m not a fan of filet mignon, to be honest. It’s a bit mushy and bland for me; I like strip steak or, better yet, hangar or flank. But who am I to look a gift cow in the mouth? I almost never buy any beef except the stewing kind, so grilled steaks are always a treat. I dug through the CSA bounty and emerged with some parsnips:

And a head of bok choy that needed to be used ASAP:

I pureed the parsnips. It’s the second time I’ve pureed parsnips, but the first time they were in a 50-50 mix with potatoes. I didn’t love that, and I definitely hated this; they are just too sweet for me. Next stop (I still have *more* in the fridge): roasting.

I sauteed the bok choy, stems first, and dressed with with a bit of sesame oil and soy sauce. Not bad for a Tuesday, right?

But I was bothered by that sickly-sweet parsnip puree. The next week, for Christmas Eve dinner with Bridge and Ben, I thawed two more NY steaks, and tried again. This time I made celeriac puree and a wilted spinach and bacon salad. Success! Without the nauseating sweetness of the parsnips (ahem. I hated them.) it was the perfect simple meal, requiring very little time in the kitchen and thus allowing more time spent with Bridge’s superior eggnog concoction.

For the celeriac I followed a recipe from Alton Brown, roughly. I had two heads of celeriac–celery root, for the uninitiated. They’re funny, knobbly, muddy things, and the hardest part was scrubbing them clean and peeling them with a paring knife.

After softening the sliced celeriac with garlic and oil, cover it with chicken stock and simmer until it is soft; about 20+ minutes. This part smells ridiculously good and will bring everyone into the kitchen to investigate.

Once the celeriac is soft, add in a bit of butter and cream and whizz it with a stick blender, making really weird sucking sounds and splattering it around a bit:

Appetizing! But trust me, it’s awesome.

Once that was ready I put it in a serving bowl, covered with foil, and put in a warm oven until we were ready to eat. I had saved about 3 tablespoons of bacon fat from breakfast the previous weekend, along with a giant freak-slice of bacon. That saved me cooking any specifically for the salad; I cut up the freak-slice, melted the fat in a big pan, and threw the bacon back in to crisp up a bit, along with a finely-sliced shallot. When the shallot was soft, I added some mustard and red wine vinegar, and a pinch of brown sugar. Mixed it around a bit to create another unappetizing mess:

But once I wilted the spinach in the warm dressing (I pulled the pan off the heat almost as soon as I put in the spinach, and I was using hearty, mature leaves–with baby spinach I’d pour the dressing over the greens in a bowl to avoid the hot pan)… Magic. It had been years since I’d had a warm spinach salad but I can’t imagine why. The bite of vinegar with the richness of bacon is so perfect. The celeriac puree is a great substitute for potatoes, with a nice mild vegetable flavor that keeps it from being too rich with red meat.

Bridge had brought a lovely bottle of wine, and it was, I have to say, one of my all-time favorite meals I’ve cooked. And so easy!

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In other news, I am very flattered to say that there’s *another* tour of our apartment up online today, this time at Apartment Therapy Boston. Check it out!

Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food, General

CSA: Winter shares 2-4, the wrap-up

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Since my cooking was pretty patchy and my posting even patchier as the end of the year drew nigh, I’m just going to post the last three mondo Winter CSA Share allotments all at once. Most of this stuff stores well; I have loads of potatoes, onions, garlic and squash in the pantry, and the veggie drawers in the fridge are stuffed with turnips, rutabaga, beets, carrots, etc.

#2 arrived right before Thanksgiving:

-Salad greens
-Kale
-Butternut squash
-Celeriac
-Red and yellow potatoes
-Turnips
-Rutabaga
-Cabbage
-Parsnips
-Carrots
-Garlic

#3, from early December:

-Bok Choi
-Leeks (used on the pizzas for the Christmas party)
-Carrots
-Onions
-Potatoes
-Kohlrabi
-Butternut squash
-Chili peppers
-Garlic

And the fourth and final share, from the week of Christmas:

-Salad greens
-Spinach
-Potatoes
-Celeriac
-Daikon radishes
-Onions
-Popcorn
-Garlic
-Rutabaga
-Carrots
-Beets!!

I’m saving those beets for next week, but I can taste them already!

By the way, last night I thawed out a frozen portion of the beef, leek and barley soup I made a couple months ago. I thought that recipe was really bland, and recommended searing the meat next time, at the very least. Well, it was just as bland upon reheating (shocking, I know), so in addition to salt and pepper I added a ton of grated parmesan cheese. It made the difference; the soup was delicious. Just a nice reminder of the power of umami… If you’re cooking something and it tastes bland, add soy sauce or parmesan, depending on which one seems logical, to get a nice flavor boost.

Cooking, Farm Box, Food, Recipes

CSA: Winter share 1 and Ben’s killer meatballs

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I decided to prolong the CSA season with a winter share: four heavy payouts every other week in November and December. Here is the first installment, which nearly killed me as I biked it home in a backpack:

-Winter melon (it developed a sketchy spot and died a sad death within a couple days, sigh.)
-Salad greens
-Spinach
-Cabbage
-Garlic
-Mystery squash
Several pounds each of:
-Carrots
-Onions
-Sweet potatoes

But the real news that week was the batch of leftovers I spent most meals consuming. Over the weekend Ben got a bee in his bonnet about meatballs, and decided to make a batch. He claims they were not an unalloyed success, but I beg to differ. Despite a bit of crunch to the onions, I think they were damn good, and besides, who argues with someone else cooking them dinner!? After a brief chopping lesson I was not allowed in the kitchen while he cooked, but here’s the triumphal plate in extreme close-up:

He used this recipe from Everyday Food, and the only adjustments we’d make next time would be to up the amount of sauce and to chop the onions finer. Oh, and after a tragic ground-turkey incident a few weeks before (how do you make a virtual sign to ward off the evil eye?), Ben subbed in ground beef for the ground turkey. I do not vouch for the turkey version, be healthy at your own risk.

Cooking, Farm Box, Food, General, Home

CSA: Week 20, end of the season and a dinner party

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So the end of October (for shame, Kate!) marked the end of the regular 20-week CSA season. I signed on for the winter share, as well, so I’m still getting vegetables bi-weekly until Christmas.

-2 apples
-1 kohlrabi
-1 ear popcorn
-Carrots (Mostly cropped out of the photo on the right by the stupid, stupid wordpress template…)
-Sweet potatoes (Ditto)
-1 bunch kale
-1 bunch chives
-2 yellow and 2 red onions
-1 bulb garlic

That week we had some friends over for dinner and I made the Suzanne Goin short ribs again (Now With Less Plastic Wrap!), along with a nice beet salad and an apple crostata.

How pretty are the pearl onions, all ready to be roasted? I think I’ll change the image at the top of the blog to have those for a while. I’m tired of the spring onions!

This time I got the cross-cut ribs that Goin calls for…They were much tricker to fit into a pan for braising!

I had to use my enormous roasting pan, and I thought I’d be short on liquid so I put in placeholders (they ended up being unnecessary).

Roasted beets in a bit of dressing, with mâche, ricotta salata and toasted walnuts:

The short ribs, served over fried circles of polenta (with chard and pearl onions):

Crostata–still the simplest and most satisfying dessert (recipe here):

But as long as we’re thinking about pie, check out the *amazing* chocolate cream pie at our favorite diner on the North Shore:

Real pudding, real whipped cream…Perfect fortification for a walk in a wonderful state park:

And I’m always charmed by mushrooms!

Sigh. A couple months ago I changed my blog template because all the photos were suddenly square. Now it’s happening again and I don’t know if it’s because I’m uploading to Picasa on my Mac? Or….something? Argh.

Family, Food, Good stuff, Home, Travel

West coast tastes

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Early in November I went out to Oregon for a short visit, to hang out with my family and help my mom with house stuff. Obviously, since what my family does is talk/think/obsess about and consume food, we….ate.

The first night, Mom made pizza bianca (from the America’s Test Kitchen recipe, I think), and a lovely cassoulet-sort-of-thing with sausages and beans and bread crumbs, as well as lentils and some other things. Lots of vegetables. Witness:

Since it was a house-decorating trip, Mom and I spent a wonderful day in Portland, where we visited the chains that Eugene doesn’t have (West Elm, Crate & Barrel). Then we headed across the river to The Hawthorne, where we had a killer lunch at Cafe Castagna. Oh man. We had their famous frisée salad, which replaces the usual poached egg with, I kid you not, a deep-friend one. When we saw that on the menu Mom laughed; I famously love anything fried, but to add it to one of the greatest salads of all time? Consider yourself lucky that I snuck a photo while there were still some shards on my plate:

(Oh, their burger was one of the best I’ve ever had, seriously. It comes with waaaay too many delicious fries.)

After lunch I dragged tired Mom around to a few indie shops that I thought would be up her alley. She has very modern, streamlined taste, and we had good luck at Life + Limb and Canoe.

Tom drove me to the airport on my last day, and we had just enough time for a stop at Burrito Boy, a Eugene classic where I have to go every time I’m in town. No visit home is complete without an order of beef tacquitos, served with the smoothest guacamole and a nice sprinkling of cheese.

Now *that* is good pre-flight fortification. I was in a good mood all the way to Salt Lake City.

Cooking techniques, Family, Food, General, Home, The Apartment

Fast forward to Thanksgiving, will you?

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Ok, so it’s happened again. I am weeks behind and I blame technology, even though I settled the root problem weeks ago. Ahem. Basically I hadn’t uploaded photos since I left my job at the end of October. …Happy December! Right. I am remedying that.

Meanwhile, um… There was a lot of eating last week. Mom and Dad were here the whole week, and my uncle was here for a couple days, and Thanksgiving was awesome. I recommend it, Thanksgiving. In case any of you forgot last week. Here, I will post some hastily-uploaded photos, because I feel really guilty, and because Thanksgiving is already sort of boring, food-blogging-wise (because who really wants to do anything different from what they have always had, deep down?), so if I post these any later it will be a joke.

I am always so entertained by brussels sprouts. I love them. We made them with pancetta in a recipe that I won’t recommend because they were more bitter than usual, though still quite beloved at the table.

I believe in dressing, not stuffing. And I don’t believe it should contain anything like nuts or dried fruit. I make it with bread cubes, celery, onion, parsley, and chicken stock. It was awesome. (In this picture it is also uncooked.)

Figuring out what I have:

Ben set the table, including the maple candies that my family always has at our places:

Brussels:

Clockwise from top left: Brussels, mashed potatoes, dressing, beans with shallots, turkey. Not shown: Carrot salad, cranberry sauce. My family eats what can only be described as a damn good, sophisticated diet year round. For Thanksgiving we tend to go simpler and keep things really classic.

Dude. So good.

Also not shown: Ben’s annual pies–chocolate cream and pumpkin.

The very best part of Thanksgiving, though, is on Friday night, when we make hot turkey sandwiches. Heat the turkey in gravy. Serve over bread you’ve toasted until hard. Agh!@!!
(I feel stupid explaining it, but Ben had never had one until a couple years ago. Because he’s a heathen.)

Oh, and to get in the holiday spirit, here I am trying to arrange lights at the top of our lovely tree. What you can’t see is the string of muttered profanity uttering from my lips as I toss the lights and get them stuck, over, and over, and over… (Also that is my t-shirt, not my tummy. I’m not quite *that* pale.)

BTW, I’m psyched that WordPress is once again cropping all my photos on the right side. Technology again!

Cooking techniques, Farm Box, Food, Recipes

CSA: Week 19, what to *do* with carrots

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So many carrots. But first, the week’s haul:

-1 butternut squash
-1 head of cabbage
-3 leeks
-3 hot peppers
-4 white potatoes
-3 daikon radishes
-1 bunch arugula
-Carrots.

At this point the carrots were starting to panic me. I had received them most weeks since august, and while we’d tried to eat carrot sticks whenever we remembered, and they were keeping very nicely in the produce drawer, I was up to about 4 pounds. There aren’t many things I dislike, but cooked carrots are high on the list. And I don’t really love many of those sweet soups (squash, carrot, etc.). I’ve since received several more pounds of carrots, but it’s no longer a problem, because: Grated carrot salad.

Obviously I’d eaten carrot salads in France, but for some reason it hadn’t occurred to me to dispose of bulk quantities of carrots this way. Maybe because I always forget that the cuisinart makes tasks like this easy? I started small. Five carrots are pictured but I only used four.

Peeling them was the most time-consuming part. After about 60 seconds of grater-plate cuisinart action (sounds dirty!) I had this:

I made a 1-to-1 dressing of peanut oil and cider vinegar, with a bit of dijon mustard and very, very finely minced garlic. (For four smallish carrots I used 1 tablespoon each of oil/vinegar; about a teaspoon of vinegar and 1 clove of garlic. The carrots give off a lot of juice once they’re salted, so that was just enough, though I’d go a little heavier next time.)

Mix dressing. Dress carrots. Add lots of salt and pepper and let it sit at least half an hour or so, to get nice and juicy and well-combined. I had trouble staying away from the bowl, as you can see from how much carrot I had to begin with:

And how much was left by the time Ben got home (that is a large bowl):

It was one of those nights when you’re too tired to eat anything complicated, much less cook, so I made a green salad and toasted cheese on bread, plus the carrot salad, and we ate our veggie plates in front of the fire. And then the next day I wolfed the rest of the carrots, and made another batch within a week. And I’m craving it again.

This is so easy, people. Go try it.

Farm Box, Food, Home, Recipes, The Apartment

CSA: Week 18, Carrot pants

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Heeeeee hee hee hee hee.

See anything interesting? Let’s zoom in:

Carrot Pants! Hee!!!

Ahem.

The goods:
-1 rutabaga
-1 bunch beets, with lovely greens (purples!)
-2 red onions
-2 apples
-Salad greens
-Sweet potato fingerlings
-Carrots, including Carrot Pants.

I still had the kale from the week before, plus the lovely, lovely purple greens from the beets, so I decided to thaw some italian sausage and figure something out.

I cut up a couple cloves of garlic and a red onion:

Took two sausages out of the casings and cooked them most of the way, then cooked the garlic and onions (in olive oil), slowly, until the onions were soft and a little sweet. All photos from this phase were both blurry AND badly lit, so I’ll spare you.

I added the kale in first, since the beet greens were pretty tender. I let those wilt down a bit, added the beet greens, let *those* wilt, poured in a little chicken stock (at this point, I scraped all the lovely browned bits up, using the chicken stock to deglaze the pan even though it was still full of things), added salt and pepper, and covered the pan.

While that finished getting tender, I sliced up a tube of Trader Joe’s organic cooked polenta–a $1.99 miracle item that you should add to your pantry today–and started crisping it up in a nonstick pan w/ a little oil. It takes longer to get crispy that you’d think; allow 10 minutes. I had to hold the greens and sausage for a little while.

When the polenta was done I added the sausage back into the greens and let it heat back up, checked for seasoning, then spooned it over a couple polenta slices, making sure to get a bit of the very savory and delicious broth.

Very fast and very, very delicious. And pretty. And I would like more now.

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In house news, that same week I received a cross-country delivery: My grandfather’s wing chair! It’s not in perfect shape but I love it in our living room.

And if anyone needs a piece or two of furniture shipped cross-country at a reasonable price by an exceptionally friendly, helpful and responsible mover, shoot me a line–I was super-happy with the guy I found!